The NLP Seminar is organised by the Linguistic Engineering Group at the Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences (ICS PAS). It takes place on (some) Mondays, usually at 10:15 am, often online – please use the link next to the presentation title. All recorded talks are available on YouTube.

3 October 2022

Sławomir Dadas (National Information Processing Institute)

Our experience with training neural sentence encoders for the Polish language  

Representing sentences or short texts as dense vectors with a fixed number of dimensions is a common technique in tasks such as information retrieval, question answering, text clustering or plagiarism detection. A simple method to construct such representation is to aggregate vectors generated by a language model or extracted from word embeddings. However, higher quality representations can be obtained by fine-tuning a language model on a dataset of semantically similar sentence pairs. In this presentation, we will introduce methods for learning sentence encoders based on the Transformer architecture as well as our experiences with training such models for the Polish language. In addition, we will discuss approaches for building large datasets of paraphrases using publicly available corpora. We will also show a practical application of sentence encoders in a system developed for finding abusive clauses in consumer agreements.

Please see also the talks given in 2000–2015 and 2015–2020.